Fireballs

A mystery "fireball" has been spotted flying over a coastal village and over a neighbouring town with one witness saying it may have been meteorite.

The football-sized fireball like object was seen over Hemsby by a 73-year-old female resident of Beach Road from her home at about 11.25pm on Sunday.

She said: "It was not a firework. It was not an object, it was a ball of fire. It came from the right and the headed left. Something was coming out of the back, like a rocket does. It was quick. It headed towards the beach. It was not an object."

She added it was so quick she did not have time to think of taking a photograph.

A summary of the activity of the CAMS BeNeLux network during the month February 2018 is presented. This month offered many clear nights, 11 nights with more than 200 orbits, 3 nights had over 300 orbits. In total 23439 meteors were recorded, 12931 of which proved multiple station, or 55%. In total 4147 orbits were collected during this month, more than during all previous months of February together.

1 Introduction

After two disappointing months, December 2017 and January 2018 with the most unfavorable weather possible for meteor video work, the poor weather continued the first few nights of February 2018 until a major improvement changed the situation from 5-6 February onwards. The month of February is a winter month with long nights in the BeNeLux while meteor activity is still fairly high. The weather used to be favorable during the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 when the network counted much less cameras than today. February 2017 was characterized by very bad weather circumstances with as many as 12 nights without any single orbit. What did February 2018 bring?

A glowing shower of meteorites is set to light up the night skies this August as hundreds of burning space rocks wipe out in Earth's atmosphere, much to the delight of stargazers across the globe.

The Perseids is a prolific shower of fiery space particles that has streaked over our planet annually for generations as Earth encounters debris falling off the Swift-Tuttle comet, which was first discovered back in 1862.

The gleaming debris is generally first seen in mid-July in the northern hemisphere but enters a particularly sweet period of viewing for amateur stargazers between August 11-13, 2018. According to NASA, the peak period happens around a moonless night when the sky is darker than normal.

"Unlike most meteor showers, which have a short peak of high meteor rates, the Perseids have a very broad peak, as Earth takes more than three weeks to plow through the wide trail of cometary dust," said Jane Houston Jones, of the US space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

A mysterious fireball exploding with the power of a small nuclear bomb which was detected not far from the US air base in Greenland has alerted a NASA space explorer. Another called for calm, saying it's not a Russian strike.

The curious tweet was released by Ron Baalke, a space explorer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in late July. "A fireball was detected over Greenland on July 25, 2018 by US government sensors at an altitude of 43.3 km," he wrote. The energy from the blast was estimated to be 2.1 kilotons.